1/26/2008

Leave to our local anti-community bloggers at www.ontheborderline.net to keep throwing open their trench coat and exposing their flaccid stupidity. "Citizen Joe" has a current post at OTBL titled: Our local health Nazi, Harsdofr…

Here's what Joe has to say...

State Senator Sheila Harsdorf (R -River Falls) and grassroots supporters of the American Cancer Society will join together in support of a statewide smoke free workplace law.

Yes Jack, she is a RINO!

Comments to the post include these by "spiritofpublicus" (aka Dr. Bill Damuson):

"Harsdorf, like all other socialists, does not believe in the sanctity of private property. She is clueless when it comes to the connection between private property, economic freedom, and personal liberties. This fall I will be voting for anyone but Shelia!"

This second comments is by "choosing life:"

"It’s time to clean house of those who claim to be Republican but who are actually fronts for the Democrats. Every time a Republican betrays their constituents, I think of the scene in Animal House where the the guy is getting whacked by a someone who likes to inflict pain. After receiving a painful whack on the backside, he says, Thank you, sir, may I have another? I’m finished with getting whacked on the backside by the traitorous Republicans."

It's interesting to see how tolerant the great debaters are at OTBL. Lots of room for intellectual discussion of the options available to those of us living in the "public square" called the United States.

I've just finished reading an interesting autobiography by Thomas Sowell titled "A Personal Odyssey." Sowell is an economist and social thinker who happens to be a black man. The OTBL bloggers quote him regularly and mention him in only glowing terms on their blog. I found at least 13 posts on OTBL the pay homage to the thoughts of Sowell.

I wonder what Sowell -- one of the foremost Marxist scholars writing today -- would think of the cheap shot, character assassinations that mark the commentary at www.ontheborderline.net. I'm sure he would be sadden to be linked to the single-mind, anti-intellectual lynch mobster with the trench coat exposing all that is wrong with today's political discourse.

What follows is an interesting quote from Sowell's book from a letter to his radical friend Al:

"Obviously you and I have differing visions of the way the economic and social system functions. This in turn means that when we want to accomplish the same objective, we often advocate opposite means. This is not very surprising, and I think the same general principle applies to the differences between the liberals and the radicals, on one side, and Kristol, Banfield,et. al., on the other. Adolescence self-righteousness has become so fashionable in the past decade that common sense and common decency have suffered a kind of environmental pollution that hurts everybody and makes all social problems more difficult to understand and deal with rationally. As an historian of ideas, I am especially struck by how far we have gone down the road to mindless labelling and almost bogey-man talk. In the 19th century, for example, in Karl Marx's numerous references to Adam Smith there was not the slightest suggestion that Smith had done anything other than call them as he aw them, just as Marx was calling them as he saw them. Smith's arguments were answered by other arguments, not by calling him "anti-worker," which would simply have been a lie...One thing I like about Marx was his utter condemnation to this kind of parlor revolutionism, for just these kinds of reasons."

My guess is that losing the five or six votes from the OTBL bloggers isn't going to have any noticeably impact on Harsdorf's chances for re-election. My guess is that 2006 was the start of it and 2008 will open the flood gates to the exodus of the cowboy conservatives that road into Washington with Ronald Reagan. They will shrink back to the size of the fruitcake conservatism that Barry Goldwater represented in the 1964 presidential election.

1 comment:

Those same 5-6 votes didn't get anybody elected to the Hudson School Board either.

To me, the use of the term "let's get rid of all the republicans" is a parallel to "let's shoot ourselves in the foot". I'm not sure that kind of statement reflects what is desired, but I do find it humorous.